Planned obsolescence

I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with cutting-edge technology; in theory I am in favour of keeping bang up to date, but in practice I find myself hanging on to old gadgets long after they should have been consigned to the recycling bin.

It’s only fairly recently that I got an LCD TV, after spending years squinting at a vintage 14-inch Sony Trinitron, latterly augmented with a digital tuning box (and an RF-modulator, since it didn’t have a SCART socket) when they turned off the analogue signal. I would still have it today, but it stopped working, and I couldn’t find anyone willing to even look at it, never mind fix it, though it was probably a simple enough job.

This state of affairs is mostly due to a combination of laziness and stinginess – I’m driving around right now in a car with two broken mirrors and a busted heater, because I resent paying the inflated fee the mechanic would charge me for swapping a couple of parts, but I can’t be bothered going down to the scrapyard to get the bits myself – along with a high tolerance for imperfection; if something isn’t actually going to kill me I can usually put up with it. That’s not the whole story though; despite being avowedly anti-conservative there is a large part of me that is resistant to change. Jobs, cities, relationships; I’ve stayed in them all long after it would have been sensible to leave. This is probably down to a subconscious fear of death or something; I should perhaps try to work through it in therapy, but I guess it has saved me a lot of money over the years.

All this is a roundabout way of explaining why there hasn’t been much in the way of Second Life content in this blog recently. When I last downloaded an updated version of the viewer (which was a while ago, so it’s not even the latest one), it had the not entirely unpredictable effect of slowing my venerable desktop box to a crawl, making my SL experience even more tiresome than usual. I suppose that I should try using some nimble third-party viewer, but the task of identifying one that is both reliable and linux-friendly seems like too much of a drag right now, and anyway the Lindens seem to be freezing out the TPV developers, so it would probably only be a temporary fix.

Thus I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that my trusty 12 year-old 1.6 GHz P4 has reached the end of the line, and that I need a new computer. The simplest solution would be to buy a ready-built machine, but I want to reuse as many components as possible, and the case, keyboard, mouse, monitor, hard drives and optical drive are all perfectly serviceable, so I think I’ll go down the DIY route.

I’ll need a new motherboard, processor, RAM, and a graphics card (I’d keep my not-too-ancient nVidia Ge Force 7-series, but it’s got an AGP plug). I’d really like an Intel I-7, but they are rather expensive, so I’ll probably settle for an I-5, which should do me for a few years; processor/motherboard/memory bundles can be had for between £200 and £300. Add in a GeForce 500 card at about a ton, and that’s a fairly nifty system for under £400.

On the other hand, who uses a desktop computer these days? I could take the money and buy a new iPad, which would do for 90% of my computing needs, pretty much everything except Second Life in fact. I do like to have a big hard drive to keep my data on, since I’m far too paranoid to trust the cloud, but I don’t need a fancy new processor or graphics card for that.

Still, I guess my inertia will keep me from wholeheartedly embracing the new paradigm of mobile computing, and I probably will end up trying to rejuvenate my old desktop. I doubt I’ll get round to it much before the summer though, so this blog will remain misleadingly named until then at least.